Re: PCI: Race condition in pci_create_sysfs_dev_files

["Oliver O'Halloran" <oohall@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 10:26 AM Bjorn Helgaas <helgaas@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> I'm not really a fan of this because pci_sysfs_init() is a bit of a
> hack to begin with, and this makes it even more complicated.
>
> It's not obvious from the code why we need pci_sysfs_init(), but
> Yinghai hinted [1] that we need to create sysfs after assigning
> resources.  I experimented by removing pci_sysfs_init() and skipping
> the ROM BAR sizing.  In that case, we create sysfs files in
> pci_bus_add_device() and later assign space for the ROM BAR, so we
> fail to create the "rom" sysfs file.
>
> The current solution to that is to delay the sysfs files until
> pci_sysfs_init(), a late_initcall(), which runs after resource
> assignments.  But I think it would be better if we could create the
> sysfs file when we assign the BAR.  Then we could get rid of the
> late_initcall() and that implicit ordering requirement.

You could probably fix that by using an attribute_group to control
whether the attribute shows up in sysfs or not. The .is_visible() for
the group can look at the current state of the device and hide the rom
attribute if the BAR isn't assigned or doesn't exist. That way we
don't need to care when the actual assignment occurs.

> But I haven't tried to code it up, so it's probably more complicated
> than this.  I guess ideally we would assign all the resources before
> pci_bus_add_device().  If we could do that, we could just remove
> pci_sysfs_init() and everything would just work, but I think that's a
> HUGE can of worms.

I was under the impression the whole point of pci_bus_add_device() was
to handle any initialisation that needed to be done after resources
were assigned. Is the ROM BAR being potentially unassigned an x86ism
or is there some bigger point I'm missing?

Oliver